Sorry to keep posting Yglesias, but he’s on this:
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1052192684805218307
Democrats need to hammer on raising taxes on rich people, but they also need to not care about deficits when in office.
They don’t come right out and say as much in the podcast, but I’ll say it since I’m a liberal: deficits are a crock. :)
I’d love to see a return to the party’s New Deal era.
Do they? Is there polling on this? I’m not sure that message plays very well.
But how will you get hand-wringing conservatives to vote for the Democratic party, then???
Sure. “Corporations and the rich pay too little in taxes” has had 60-80% support for the last 25 years.
I don’t know about the polling, but I’m concerned that if wealth inequality crosses a certain threshold it’s gonna be pretty hard to have a functioning democracy.
From the link I posted earlier:
- 80 percent of Americans think some corporations don’t pay their fair share of taxes.
- 78 percent think some wealthy people don’t pay their fair share of taxes.
- 76 percent believe the wealthiest Americans should pay higher taxes.
- 60 percent of registered voters believe corporations pay too little in taxes.
- 87 percent of Americans say it is critical to preserve Social Security, even if it means increasing Social Security taxes paid by wealthy Americans.
- 67 percent of Americans support lifting the cap to require higher-income workers to pay Social Security taxes on all of their wages.
Just be sure to say to raise corporate taxes.
Because when you say raise “taxes” everyone thinks they mean themselves.
Just point out two things:
Apple has more cash than England; is this fair?
When oil producers benefited from higher than normal commodity prices in Oklahoma, they convinced them to lower taxes on O&G production because it was a “windfall”. Do you get to cut your tax bill in half just because you made double this year?
It’s not too hard to explain that you plan to 1) raise top marginal tax rates that will only impact the top 10%, and 2) add more brackets at the top to raise rates on the top 1% and the top 0.1%. And of course 3) tax capital gains as ordinary income, and 4) eliminate the social security contribution cap so that high earners pay their fair share of social security.
But it doesn’t always work.
Again I point to Connor Lamb as an example, mainly just because he’s near me. They tried to portray him as some pawn of Pelosi, but they failed. Because it obviously wasn’t true.
That’s not the attack that stuck to her.
The attacks most effective against her were perceptions of corruption and crap. Now, of course we need to acknowledge the ABSURD cognitive dissonance required to say you care about that, and then vote for Trump, but Trump’s plan was less about winning over the folks who cared about that, and more about just making folks hate both candidates and not vote at all.
Folks need to realize that this does not matter, even one tiny bit. People in other countries don’t vote in America.
You need to base your candidacy upon America’s electorate. And yes, America is to the right of European countries. That’s the reality of the situation. You need to work with that.
The way to move things to the left is to incrementally move the needle. You can’t just slam it off from its current position, because then you are going to get resistance from independents who aren’t necessarily diametrically opposed to your ideas, but are just inherently fearful (or can be made fearful) of big changes.
…by raising top marginal tax rates to where they were under that infamous Marxist Ronald Reagan.
So basically the old late 1970s “windfall profits tax” turned on its head, sheesh. Truly, the lunatics are running the asylum.
And yet the GOP/Trump’s argument that we should lower taxes on corporations so that their bring their money back to America, because lower taxes is better than zero taxes, is hard to argue against by saying, “we should make them pay more!” Closing tax loopholes might be an easier sell, or playing hardball with tax haven countries around the world, to get that money from them.
And this is the problem that’s caused by the standard line about taxing the wealthy. If you are taking their money because they can afford to contribute more to stuff everyone benefits from, that a positive message. Taking their money because they shouldn’t have so much of it is scary communism. SO this is my point - Dems need to find a way to redistribute wealth and cap wealth inequality that doesn’t feel so much like robbery.
An example might be to create a new kind of wealth-based tax that is tied to a credit earned through charitable contributions. So instead of saying, “You must give the government 60% of your increase in net worth each year”, you add, “But all contributions to charities are tax-refundable.” Of course, then you actually have to police charities and not like nonsense like the Trump foundation skate by.
I just saw what McConnell said. Pretty sure it was some weird form of ritual suicide. Telling all the old people he’s gonna cut their social security and Medicare? The Democrats could not have asked for a better gift going into the midterms.
Don’t know what he was thinking there
Seeing the matter phrased this way sets my inner Marxist a-twitchin’ :)
We’ve already won the argument. Most people think corporations and rich people don’t pay enough in taxes, and think they should pay higher taxes. We don’t need to argue for our position, we just need to advertise it, and legislate it when we have power.
He’ll just deny he said it, claim this is actually Chuck Schumer’s plan, and also Schumer is a j… globalist.
Is there a video of him saying that? Because if there is, it’s gone to be run a million times in the next month.
Absentee ballot requests and early voting are up in some states and down in others compared to the same time in 2014. Maryland is up for the Dems but overall the total volume of ballots returned in 37 states at this point is just 1.2% higher than at this point in the 2014 midterm, meaning that all the indications of increased enthusiasm are not yet translating into ballots cast. Source for this is state Secretaries of State and Boards of Elections in the 37 early vote/absentee ballot states.
Don’t know what to make of this. Except that non-white voters, younger voters and unmarried women, the so-called Rising American Electorate prefer to vote on Election Day. So if there is a Blue Wave it is not showing up yet in the early vote data.
In addition to the number of early votes in, some states show a slightly elevated Democratic vote share over 2014 and some show a slightly elevated Republican voter share over 2014.
The tea leaves are troubling.
Her timing sucks, and if she actually thought she could “shut Trump up” she was foolish. He can now call her Pocahontas and say it is okay because she is 1% Indian.
By the way, I am reading the book 1491 and the author claims in the book, and sites sources for what it is worth, that “native Americans” actually prefer the term “Indian”. Anyone else read that and care to comment on it.